Eric Mack On-Line

Marc Orchant is moderating this afternoon's panel on GTD and Office 2.0 and the Office 2.0 Conference. Compared to other sessions, room is packed. I'm live-blogging, with the goal to have this live, including photo, before Marc steps away from the podium. (Just for Michael)

Marc asked for a show of hands: most of audience has read Getting Things Done, few have attended a GTD seminar.

Each presenter has a 2 minute demo window, then Marc will ask for questions from the audience... First up: Robert Walker of Vitalist (www.vitalist.com) Web-based, opens to dashboard. Can pull in feeds. Has mobile version (e.g. iphone.vitalist.com) Second up; Mark Mader, Smartsheet.com Results focused collaboration based on a spreadsheet model but with an emphasis on sharing - all in a browser. Everything is a list. Implementation of hierarchies looks well done by allowing you to indent/outdent. Neat tool to show deltas between previous sessions. Seems to be more free-form spreadsheet than a structured task manager. You can send the smart sheet, via PDF or Excel. once or repeatedly, over the web as a link. The Office 2.0 element is collaboration - the ability to invite others into the process to work with your lists. Third Presenter: Michael Sliwinski, creator of Nozbe Michael is CEO of Apvision.com. Invites us to test Nozbe live on the web at nozbe.com. (One of the few presenters that mentions David Allen and concepts in the book.) Also web-based. Includes time tracking. (Think GTD 2-in timer). Good point: this is just a tool. get to work. Last up: Tim Norton, Business planning based on GTD. Tim is CEO of Plan HQ. Ties projects to goals. I like the names of sections: "What I've done this week" (Completed), "What I've got coming up" (Tickler) etc. Nice. Nice Backburner feature - will move things to Someday Maybe and sends an email alert to project participants.

2. minutes per presenter is not much time. Marc invites Ismael to speak. One book changed my life: GTD. What a great testimony! Book is a series of simple recipes. Ismael looked for a tool to help implement. Decided to do this inside of SaleForce.com. Likes ability to attach tasks to leads, campaigns, etc. and see tasks by each. It took several thousand tasks to create Office 2.0 Conf. He uses delegated action management within Saleforce.com. Challenge: Salesforce was not designed with GTD in mind. Ismael has a goal to get to the moon, but he's looking for what the next action would be. (Ismael, "It's call Fred") Marc does the wrap-up Good Q&A session. Too fast to summarize, but I'll try, I may have to review audio.

1. How do you handle the necessity for people to narror down their focus to get things done, with the need to also see the big picture of what they are doing? (Ismael had a good point about the challenge of finding the next action for subprojects. I think the answer is to have a set of good questions.)

2. Is GTD Great only for personal productivity or can it also be used for teams/businesses? (Audience comment on lack of software suitable for implement GTD in a team.) Some of this boils down to process, not tool, e.g. how to make projects & actions visible. Brief discussion of Gyronix ResultsManager as a tool for Mapping - both ways - in the framework of MindManager.

Audience member complained about challenge of weekly review, needs reminder at task completion to prompt for next action. A valid complaint. eProductivity does that. Quick discussion about priorities and contexts. Marc did a nice job of explaining how the two relate. Context, time, priority. Good job, Marc.

3. Why web-based applications for Geting Things Done? Michael: Accessibility, different devices, no need to sync. other: option to plug GTD data into other applications, thougfh feed, RSS, gadgets, etc. Other: huge population that will not follow GTD but will use tools to do the work for them. interesting.